New survey: Most Americans unconcerned about global warming ‘threat’

The number of people unconcerned about the much-ballyhooed global warming threat has jumped to nearly 40 percent in only four months based on a new survey released yesterday and conducted by AP/NORC. That’s almost an eight percent increase since July. The survey, which was given before and after the current Pope’s first visit to the United States, shows that among adults aged 18 and above, only 38 percent of Americans are “not worried at all” or “not too worried” about global warming (how the survey was phrased).

More interesting, of those who believe global warming is occurring, 35 percent think global warming is mostly natural and man-made, and 13 percent think it’s a combination of the two. Shockingly, only 12 percent believe it is caused entirely by human activities, and only 39 percent think it is caused mostly by human activities (italics used to indicate survey wording).

The number of participants totaled 1,058, of which 753 were surveyed via web and 305 via telephone, and conducted by The Associated Press (AP) and NORC Center for Public Affairs Research. All respondents resided in the 50 states and District of Columbia. The survey showed that 17 percent were not worried at all and 22 percent not too worried. Only 8 percent of Americans were extremely worried about global warming, roughly the same since July. And only 14 percent were very worried.

Anthony Leiserowitz, director of the Yale Program on Climate Change Communication, said that the “sense of worrying has been absent in yearly surveys.” Renata Schram, a customer service representative from Michigan, told the AP that “when we hear about global warming everything seems so distant. On my list of things that worry me today, global warming is kind of low.” The world’s violence is a far more pressing issue, she says.

The survey also showed that 49 percent of respondents didn’t consider global warming a moral issue, and 12 percent weren’t sure. The vast majority, 79 percent, did not believe it was a religious issue, while 57 percent thought it was not a social justice (fairness) issue. Fifty-five percent did think it was a political issue, while 72 percent said it was a scientific issue. Nearly two-thirds said it was not a poverty issue, contradicting what Democrats have been saying since their Las Vegas-hosted Democratic debate.

According to Dana Fisher, director of the Program for Society and the Environment at the University of Maryland, “The big deal is that climate has not been a voting issue of the American population. If the American population were left to lead on the issue of climate, it’s just not going to happen.” If that sounds eerily familiar to when Obamacare adviser/author Jonathon Gruber said that the only way we can pass Obamacare is to take advantage of the “stupidity of the American voter”, you’d be right on the money.

The EPA has already admitted to Congress that all of its new regulations wouldn’t avert the planet from warming even a single degree, but rather it would be an example that the world could follow. China and India, the largest CO2 emitters, have already indicated they are not. The difference here is that we are now paying higher rates and fees, all for a symbolic gesture, instead of innovating and leading through new technology, free enterprise, and capitalism.

Myron Ebell, a policy expert at the conservative American Enterprise Institute, said the “elites on the coast may be concerned about global warming” but “people in the heartland who dig stuff up, grow stuff or make stuff are used to the vagaries of extreme weather.” Ebell also said, “They don’t see it as much of a problem” because it isn’t. The latest Gallup poll also bares this out and shows that the economy, and not global warming, are on the list of top concerns for Americans. Global warming also ranked dead last in Gallup’s list of top environmental concerns released earlier this year.

One reason for the disconnect between the alarmists, the Democratic presidential candidates who say global warming is the “greatest, most immediate threat” facing mankind, and everyday people is that scientists aren’t “communicating their worries well,” the AP intones. Another reason may be is that as of press time, it has been a full 10 years since a category 3-5 hurricane has hit the United States. Hurricane Sandy was was a Category 2 when it finally made landfall and quickly dissipated into a tropical depression.

According to Paul Driessen, a senior policy analyst and climate expert at CFACT.org, that’s a record dating back to at least 1900. “It’s also the first time since 1914 that no hurricanes formed anywhere in the Western Atlantic, Caribbean Sea or Gulf of Mexico through September 22 of any calendar year.” He also says that global temperatures have barely budged in nearly 19 years (the warming haitus) and have become more out of sync with computer model predictions with every passing year.” Even the IPCC has acknowledged the disparity between the computer model predictions and observed global temperatures.

As we first reported Monday, NASA also released a new study showing that Antarctica has added more ice than it’s lost in the past 30 years, a finding that challenges all other research, including the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, which said Antarctica is losing more land ice than not. Not only that, but because the projections were off by so much, Antarctica is actually slowing down post-glacial (end of last Ice Age) sea level rise.

All of which is not lost on any individual with access to the Internet, who can easily Google for facts, instead of relying on notoriously fickle computer models. Even climate scientist Katherine Hayhoe of Texas Tech admitted at a meeting of top climate scientists that, “More facts are not going to fix the problem. Nearly every human on the planet has the values they need to care about climate change. We just need to connect the dots.” Read that again. Hayhoe told a group of like-minded scientists that people do not need more facts.

Except people do want more facts and have already started connecting the dots. The picture that keeps forming is that global warming is neither occurring at the rates predicted by these same scientists, nor is “extreme weather” happening more often as predicted by their computer models. And since computer models are as only as good as the data being fed them, people are smart enough to understand that what’s going in is terribly amiss (read how NOAA started cooking the temperature books).

Even Obama’s EPA conceded that all the new regulations they have rolled out will only avert warming “less than 0.2 degrees Celsius.” That isn’t even within the statistical margin of error for most cost-benefit analyses. All told, Obama’s scheme to fight global warming will cost the American taxpayer “upwards of $73 billion a year to avoid two-tenths of one degree Celsius.”

Worse still, The Daily Caller is reporting that Obama has “already imposed $26 billion a year worth of regulations to cut carbon dioxide emissions and other greenhouse gases from vehicles and power plants.” In layman’s terms, these 15 new rules (out of thousands already implemented) will cost “$230 billion and stop just 0.06 degrees Celsius of projected warming.” And Obama wants even more regulations before he leaves office.

As all the candidates gear up their respective campaigns for the upcoming primaries and subsequent elections, they may want to keep in mind the top concerns actually facing Americans, and not those being falsely promulgated to ensure Obama retains an ambitious climate legacy. As Democratic strategist James Carville famously told Bill Clinton’s campaign workers in 1991: “It’s the economy, stupid.” Today, that snowclone could very well end with, “and not global warming.”